The words are maps.

“We do lose what we never had. Because we imagine.”

“Reading was, of course, a great help – it stirred, delighted, and tormented me.”

— be not caused —

“I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.”

“The one real requirement of life: an openness to what is lovely among all the rest that isn’t.”

“This realization, that nature even at its most beautiful defies our attempts to understand it, stands irrevocably apart from us, is a deep root of Camus’s famous assertion that the world is “absurd.” Camus’s main idea of absurdity, as Zaretsky unpacks it, is a matter of imbalance between desire and reality—humans long for ultimate meaning and crystalline clarity, but the god-shorn cosmos offers neither of these. It remains coldly, majestically indifferent and inexplicable. The first part of Camus’s response to this fact is to advocate for clear-eyed acceptance—we should commit to live fully in this absurd world, “without appeal” to God or Progress or any quasi-mystical utopian politics. This is simply all there is, and once again, we should look straight and hard at reality, without veiling it behind the gauzy fabric of some high concept or conceit.”